Soft Skeletons

Frenchkiss; 2007

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One of my musical pet peeves is the incompatibility of punk rock and its cousin subgenres with anything that smells of a concept album. It's almost as if the mere act of thinking through one's music enough to create a cohesive album-length concept, be it as simple as a thematic focus or as complex as a narrative structure, is a crime of pretension severe enough to cut one's punk membership card in half. This line of thinking ignores the fact that punk was essentially built upon fictional premises, the idea of band-as-outlaw perpetuated by the Clash or the Ramones, not to mention the more obvious conceptual themes groups like the Misfits or the Descendents used to drive their respective aesthetics.

Fortunately, a few modern bands are similarly dismissive of this inaccuracy, from the straightforward, sci-fi editorializing approach of the Thermals to the farther-out-there concepts that Liars use to organize their experiments. Soft Skeletons indicates that Call Me Lightning are another band unafraid of thematic consistency, as it features several songs dealing with, well, skeletons. But bony ghouls are just the album's most persistent symbol; in a larger sense, Soft Skeletons is an album about death and dying, a morose focus at odds with the band's raucous garage-punk. It's not an entirely discordant clash of sound and message; with their cartoonish seizure guitars and video-game basslines, the band sounds like they're playing endless punk-rock variations on the Tales From the Crypt theme or the Danny Elfman score for a Tim Burton movie. Appropriate then to be talking about shattered tombs ("Billion Eyes") or describing post-death biological processes from the point of view of the corpse ("Beaming Streaks"), as if Call Me Lightning were crafting a rock'n'roll tribute to EC Comics.

However, for such an approach, a certain level of acting chops are required from the singer, as it's easier to swallow songs about zombies and hauntings when delivered with the B-movie affectations of a Glenn Danzig or Nick Cave. Call Me Lightning's Nathan Lilley chooses instead to go the vocal-cord ripping route, yelling and screeching over the din of his band and sacrificing any kind of creepy subtlety in the process. His limitations show on tracks both fast (the Advantage-like "Nobody Dies") and slow (the brooding "Filthy Information"), while the vocal melodies (and the shoutalong backings) frequently lose out to the playful and tuneful runs of the guitar/bass interplay. Call Me Lightning aspire to be a Milwaukee spin on the snide throwback Pixies-punk of Mclusky, but whether due to lack of Welsh accent or a less sharp sense of humor, Soft Skeletons never quite gets there. Sure, songs like "Bottles and Bottles" or "Shadow Twin", at least instrumentally, generate a novel spin on the familiar moves of spastic post-punk Frenchkiss acts. But too many stumbles and failures of execution keep the record from being much more than a noble attempt at reconciling punk with its conceptual roots, leaving an attempt at horror-punk that doesn't succeed at being even marginally scary or particularly memorable.